or years before their spectacular breakup, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow inhabited that perturbing limbo between known and unknown, real and fantastic, intimate and
stranger. Some of the movies they made together -- ''Hannah and Her Sisters,'' for example -- inevitably, perhaps even intentionally, dismantled whatever boundary exists between audience and voyeur. Now, five years
after the flurry of attention around the Allen-Farrow custody battle, itself transformed by the media into entertainment, Ms. Farrow is publishing a memoir, one that will satisfy a Peeping Fan readership.

''What Falls Away'' is the story of a life, Ms. Farrow tells us, that Mr. Allen himself observed would make a great movie -- one filled, a la ''Zelig,'' with events and personages simultaneously magnified and flattened
by fame. She builds her story on the Hollywood pedigree of her actress mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, and her writer-director father, John Farrow. At 19 Ms. Farrow meets Frank Sinatra, and later marries him. The epilogue to that brief
first marriage is the obligatory 60's flight from Western materialism to an Indian ashram, compromised (or validated, depending on your perspective) by the sudden appearance of the Beatles. In 1970, Ms. Farrow marries the pianist
and composer Andre Previn; alongside Vanessa Redgrave, she wheels their twins on protest marches through London parks. By the time she embarks on an affair with Woody Allen, in 1980, the reader has been treated to cameos by a glitterati
chorus that the author employs to observe and comment upon her life. Through it all, Ms. Farrow makes it clear that what is most significant to her is the creation of family -- the birth of four children (three fathered by Mr. Previn and
one by Mr. Allen) and the adoption of 10. As a vocation, Motherhood eclipses Acting.

''What Falls Away'' begins: ''I was 9 when my childhood ended.'' Ms. Farrow goes on to describe her brief battle with polio, one that seems to have left her with an emotional if not a physical limp. A child who
perceives herself as cut off from girlhood, she becomes the waif-woman fascinated with the never-never landscape of childhood, one who decades later (and before the liaison with Mr. Allen) characterizes herself as having an ''inner
life of turmoil, fear, loss, loneliness and disillusionment'' -- a frightening void, which, it is difficult not to conclude, she fills with children: 14 of them.

The desire to transform a life, to offer love and security to a destitute and ailing orphan, is not one that requires explanation. But adopting 10 children, added to four of one's own, 10 children whose frailty and need are increasingly equated with
their desirability, prompts curiosity. What drives it? When Ms. Farrow writes, ''I watched my children grow, and I collected the memories,'' when her response to periods of upheaval and strain is to fill out adoption
forms -- ''Again I placed the bassinet with the patchwork lining beside my bed'' -- the reader begins to suspect that what Ms. Farrow is really collecting is order, solace, meaning, redemption. That she arms herself
against her demons with children. Certainly, in a family of such size, it would be difficult to hear oneself think, let alone feel one's loneliness.

Public knowledge of the rupture between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow coincided with reports of an affair between Mr. Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, Ms. Farrow's 21-year-old adoptive daughter. Briefly: On Jan. 13, 1992, just weeks after Mr. Allen had adopted
two of Ms. Farrow's younger children, Ms. Farrow discovered on a mantle at Mr. Allen's apartment six Polaroid photographs of (as she describes them) ''a naked woman with her legs spread wide apart.'' The woman
was Soon-Yi, the daughter Ms. Farrow had adopted from a Korean orphanage in 1977 while married to Mr. Previn. The upheaval following the discovery of the photographs was marked by vindictiveness on both sides. Ms. Farrow claimed that Mr.
Allen had long been focusing inappropriate sexual attention on their 7-year-old adoptive daughter Dylan. He claimed that her accusation was inspired by vengeance, not fact. She sent him ''a family picture Valentine with skewers
through the hearts of the children'' and hung a sign on his bathroom door that read ''Child Molester.'' He continued to see Soon-Yi without conceding that his involvement with her was morally suspect. All
of it was ugly and it made great television.

Mia Farrow

There is a grotesque poetic logic to the affair between Ms. Farrow and Mr. Allen, and to its breakup. Opposites do attract, and we understand the mutual fascination between the relentlessly domestic nurturer and the solitary neurotic. A kind of wacky
pathos is evoked by Ms. Farrow's descriptions of Mr. Allen's bewilderment at finding himself entangled with a woman who's forced to buy milk and toilet paper in bulk and who tramped across Central Park with seven children
in tow, all bearing sleeping bags, for an overnight at his apartment. When the end of their relationship takes the form of her accusing him of the violation of one of the children, we may be sickened, but not exactly surprised.

Throughout her book, Ms. Farrow reports serious traumas, including the death of her beloved older brother, a nearly fatal case of peritonitis and the birth of an autistic child, without a fraction of the anguish inspired by the sexual liaison between
Soon-Yi and Mr. Allen. Nothing else, the reader suspects, could have so thoroughly blasted apart Ms. Farrow's carefully constructed redemption than this betrayal, linked by the author to her lingering fear of polio and the disease's
perceived destruction of her own childhood: ''I found myself experiencing the same creeping fear I'd had as a child, after the polio: that I had unknowingly brought danger into my family and that I might have contaminated
those I loved the most.''

The danger, the contaminant -- the disease -- is Mr. Allen. Recounting a Christmas dinner, Ms. Farrow shows us a Rockwellian feast complete with two turkeys, countless side dishes, punch and eggnog, herself and nine of her children around the table, all
presided over by an elaborate carved-angel centerpiece. Mr. Allen arrives and, after making a snide comment (''Pardon me while I puke''), retreats into the kitchen where he turns on the juicer. ''Nobody wants
this?'' he asks, holding up the large glass of apple juice he's made.

Of course, given the bounty, no one does, and he pours it down the drain. The point of this story is to reveal a bitter, jaundiced spirit, and perhaps it does. But the average only child, less famously troubled than Mr. Allen, would corroborate that it
is acutely uncomfortable to find oneself on the periphery of the Big Happy Family, and that the position rarely brings out the best in a person. And what of the six Polaroid photographs? As Ms. Farrow attests, Mr. Allen knew she would
be in his living room; he even telephoned while she was there, so that she would have to pass by the mantle to answer. She interprets his leaving them there as an act of emotional terrorism; but isn't it equally possible to see it
as a confession?

The reader would not feel a need to take Mr. Allen's part if Ms. Farrow did not so consistently portray him as cold, disturbed and monstrously selfish, juxtaposing these judgments with evidence of her own sensitivity and spiritual superiority. And
while she concedes that it is ''unusual . . . in a memoir'' to include the unabridged court decision that documented their custody battle, it is perhaps not so unusual in an account whose intent, it emerges, is to solicit
sympathy in the court of public opinion. (For the record, Mr. Allen was not granted custody, but neither was he found to have sexually abused Dylan.)

Some of Ms. Farrow's writing is simple and affecting. A lot is melodramatic. In contrast to the manipulative passages, what remains genuinely moving is the probably unintended resonance between the portrayal of two young women, one glimpsed at the
beginning of ''What Falls Away,'' the other at its end. Each finds herself entangled with an older man; each remains curiously alone in the storm of controversy surrounding an ill-advised romance. The first is Mia Farrow,
21, perched on a Las Vegas bar stool at 2 A.M., asleep with her head on a table while Frank Sinatra gambles and brawls, constantly on the run from tabloid photographers. The second is Soon-Yi Previn, eerily echoing her mother as she is
suddenly thrown into the glare of public scrutiny. Together they make unnerving and apt bookends to a disturbing memoir.

Kathryn Harrison is a novelist. Her memoir, "The Kiss," will be published next month.